Let’s talk about Phonogram. Or, maybe, let’s talk about the idea of Phonogram and the phonomancy that pulls its story. The idea behind it is to dig into a song and pull from it that essential spark that gives it power. In a way, you create magic with how you listen to and use the music closest to you. This magic can be worked in dozens of ways as each practitioner experiences music differently and maintains their own specialty. But with that in mind, let’s look at something completely different in Closer by Kieron Gillen, Steve Lieber, Tamra Bonvillain, and Clayton Cowels.

There’s been anomalies in the city recently. Without explanation, birds have been appearing more and more, namely localized to one specific block and one specific person: Marigold Dunwoody. It defies explanation as these birds simply appear when she’s around, breaking all known laws of physics. But when she walks out of the lab running the bird experiment, the stars in the sky begin to fall, her hair glows, and her eyes turn from brown to blue while all the girls in town begin to follow her around. But her escape from the girls in town leads her to a bar—one in which her ex, Luther, is still trying to propose to her and is using the power of the Carpenters to try to win her back. But, as is the case with a poorly-planned grand gesture, Marigold doesn’t reciprocate and the angels in the song only listen to her.

Closer is an interesting little thing as it’s only a single issue that had originally been a part of the Image! 30^th anniversary anthology a few years ago. But it’s the kind of single-issue story that Gillen himself has talked about wanting to do in his newsletter. It’s the apocalyptic romance that can fit into just a few pages and doesn’t need a series written around it as the premise is all that we need in this case. And that’s kind of what we should be doing more in comics. Single issues with single stories are one of the best ways to get those stories in front of people who just need something brief. As much as I love to dig into a sixty issue run, there’s times when I only have time to get to one issue and giving a concentrated burst of creativity that shows the kind of story that could only exist on its own (or maybe in Phonogram) lets creators play with single ideas.

The more comics I read, the more I know that not everything needs to be a series. Short stories are one of the best places for comics to go as the medium has predetermined page counts and limits that creators can play with for these kinds of ideas. Sometimes those limits can help create work that stands on its own incredibly well and becomes a comic you can pass around to your friends to show them what the medium can really do. 

Get excited. Get wood-working.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.